PHILADELPHIA—As Bill Clinton was walking us step by step through the life of his wife, his stories echoed another speech at another convention.

Here was Bill, talking about their house in Arkansas: “It had 1,100 square feet, an attic, fan and no air conditioner in hot Arkansas, and a screened-in porch. ... I bought the house. My mortgage was $175 a month.”

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Here he was, talking of some of the work she did as a young woman: "And then between college and law school, on a total lark, she went alone to Alaska and spent some time sliming fish. … She took a summer internship interviewing workers in migrant camps for Senator Walter Mondale’s subcommittee. … She got so involved in children’s issues that she actually took an extra year in law school working at the child studies center to learn what more could be done to improve the lives and the futures of poor children."

Now, here's George H.W. Bush describing his own move to a new life, in the acceptance speech he delivered 28 years ago.

“We moved to west Texas 40 years ago. The war was over, and we wanted to get out and make it on our own. Those were exciting days. Lived in a little shotgun house, one room for the three of us. Worked in the oil business, started my own. In time we had six children. Moved from the shotgun to a duplex apartment to a house. Lived the dream — high school football on Friday night, Little League, neighborhood barbecue. People don't see their experience as symbolic of an era — but of course, we were. So was everyone else who was taking a chance and pushing into unknown territory with kids and a dog and a car."

And here's the elder Bush, talking about what he did as a young man: "But the big thing I learned is the satisfaction of creating jobs, which meant creating opportunity, which meant happy families, who in turn could do more to help others and enhance their own lives. I learned that the good done by a single good job can be felt in ways you can't imagine.”

What links these speeches is that they take the same approach to the same problem: How to redefine a person. Hillary Clinton today is seen by a dangerously large number of Americans as an entitlement queen, raking in huge sums of money, exempting her from the rules others must live by. In1988, George H.W. Bush was seen as a creature of privilege, the embodiment of Andover-Yale WASP, a faithful vice president without tensile strength, burdened by what Newsweek called “the wimp factor.”

Bush redefined himself with a highly effective speech, crafted in large measure by Peggy Noonan, that cast him as tough and decisive, and a man whose values and background were emblematic of his generation, (A film before the speech began by reminding viewers that Bush was an 18-year-old Naval aviator in World War II, who narrowly survived Japanese anti-aircraft fire.)

In Bill Clinton’s case, the almost wholly biographical speech, largely stripped of policy arguments, was designed to cast Hillary Clinton as a gritty, tireless fighter for the dispossessed: the girl deprived of education because of a disability, the children left in foster care for lack of an adoptive family, the men and women of the armed forces whose cause she championed as a senator:

(“So she tried to make sure people on the battlefield had proper equipment. She tried to expand and did expand health care coverage to Reservists and members of the National Guard. She got longer family leave, working with Senator Dodd, for people caring for wounded service members.”)

And for those inclined to see Hillary as the fanatically ambitious caricature out of a Kate McKinnon Saturday Night Live skit, there was the reminder of that most sacrosanct of roles: “For the next 17 years, through nursing school, Montessori, kindergarten, through T-ball, softball, soccer, volleyball and her passion for ballet, through sleepovers, summer camps, family vacations and Chelsea’s own very ambitious excursions, from Halloween parties in the neighborhood, to a Viennese waltz gala in the White House, Hillary first and foremost was a mother.”

In reaching back to another candidate with an image problem, what Clinton did not do was as intriguing as what he did do. There was no attempt to acknowledge failures or errors of judgment—“emails” did not get a mention—and no direct attempt to deal with the trust issue. Instead, Bill Clinton rested his case on a remarkably detailed account of the life he and Hillary led, and argued that the Hillary you think you know is a “cartoon.” The Hillary he knows, and is in a unique position to introduce, is someone unimpeachably middle-class: a scrapper, a coper, as well as the great change agent he described by the end.

In an election that has unexpectedly hinged on the anxieties of the left-out American middle, Bill Clinton was staking out a crucial piece of territory. And at this point in their lives, it's a portrait requiring a genuinely gifted communicator to paint effectively. It also may be Bill’s attempt to lay the groundwork for the case she will make for herself Thursday night, knowing that, for all of his storied eloquence, it is a case that over the next three months must be made most effectively by her.